Friday the 13th Films Ranked: #9 ‘Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood’ (1988)

#9 in my definitive ranking of Friday the 13th Films

Carrie meets Jason, except that Carrie was actually using the paranormal to tell a human story about becoming your parents and repression and this version is a loose collection of ideas about psychics and telekinesis thrown together almost randomly in service of yet another Jason Vorhees adventure. Gone is the sense of fun and knowing self-awareness of the sixth entry. John Carl Buechler helms a script by Mauel Fidello and Daryl Haney that wants to be more than it can succeed at being. Ultimately, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood ends up representing this series’ worst impulses which has this great tendency to make everything just boring.

The funny thing about this franchise is that if you actually follow the dates spoken of through the films, the bulk of this movie probably takes place in the 2000s. Just after Jason (Kane Hodder) has been left at the bottom of Crystal Lake, a young girl uses her psychic powers to murder her abusive father, scarring her for life. Roughly a decade later, Tina (Lar Park Lincoln) returns to Crystal Lake with her mother (Susan Blu) and her primary psychologist Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser) because the good doctor wants to use her emotional connection to the place to try and bring out her innate psychic powers. By the way, this is established clearly and in the open early, and Tina’s mother gets really made later when she learns that Dr. Crews was trying to make Tina an emotional basket case to get what he wanted, even though it’s kind of obvious that’s what he’s doing from the beginning.

Anyway, it wouldn’t be a Jason Vorhees movie without a bevy of 20-year old teenagers, and we get that as a group of them rent the house next door for a surprise birthday party of one of them. They are, of course, mostly cannon fodder for Jason’s inevitable return, but the most prominent end up being Nick (Kevin Blair) who takes a shine to Tina and Melissa (Susan Jennifer Sullivan) who is jealous of the attention Nick shows Tina. The rest are an assorted mix of thin personality types who are meant to get killed in close proximity to sex.

Jason ends up coming back because Tina concentrates on the lake where her father died, apparently has the psychic powers to bring dead things back to life, and it gets applied to Jason, who is soon up and running, decayed over the years (though still solid because of course), and inelegantly stabbing teenagers to death as it takes everyone forever to figure out what’s going on.

What this series figured out to some small degree in the fourth entry was that the formula was stupid and the joy of the films had to come from the combination of the kills and the comedy derived from the side characters. I think this one tries that (the focus is more dramatic, which is why precious little of this film works since the dramatics are thin, unconvincing, and spread across too many barely noticeable characters to work), but it’s too little across the runtime, and not much is all that funny.

Take Eddie (Jeff Bennett), a wannabe science fiction writer. He seems to be the butt of some jokes, mostly about how absurd his ideas are, and yet it’s just not funny. I think he’s in the film as this writer because the writers of the film were “going back to basics” after the sixth entry showed the world that the franchise could be different, and they’re making fun of the previous film’s pretensions around, you know, being a fun movie.

The kills aren’t great either, apparently being heavily cut down to avoid an X rating. The kills end up largely bloodless as the edit cuts everything short, implying a whole lot more than this series needs to sustain itself. It’s a disappointment.

So, the point is the ultimate conflict between psychic and Jason, and some of this stuff is halfway decent, like Tina controlling branches to contain Jason, but it’s ultimately bottom of the barrel stuff that anyone with half a day to come up with a set piece that utilizes telekinesis could come up with.

There was one plot turn late that I had early dismissed as not possible because it was too smart for the film, and then it actually did it, and then it did nothing with it. The idea was that Dr. Crews brought Tina to Crystal Lake to use her powers to bring Jason back to life. Tina’s mother finds clippings in his drawer implying that he had done it, but then it’s never brought up again because…I dunno. It might have been a fun twist if Dr. Crews had ended up being Tommy Jarvis. It wouldn’t have made much sense, but it would have been something.

I’m disappointed that this series decides to return to its roots of unfun. It didn’t seem to work, though. The seventh entry grossed less at the box office than the sixth (which had, fair enough, grossed less than the fifth), and the series was on a course for dying out. Six really felt like a fluke when I saw it, but seven just proves it. The Friday the 13th franchise is meant to be stupid and boring.

Originally published here